


two bodies in motion

by impossibletruths



Series: until the dawn [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fill, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 04:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17379230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: Today, there is a blip in her morning routine.





	two bodies in motion

**Author's Note:**

> day seven the [30 days of domestic fluff](https://cityandking.tumblr.com/post/180245590817/30-days-of-domestic-fluff) challenge: exercise. set mid-game

There’s a meditative quality to her morning practices. Something about the motion, the forms, the precision of stepping through them with nothing but the straw-stuffed dummies and the early-riser songbirds to see. It is a blessed relief from the pages upon pages of reports she needs to read, the decisions awaiting her input, the blinding adrenaline of a real fight. She can be _there_ when she practices, present, aware of each shift in her weight and the scrape of the stave against her calluses and the early, dew-damp smell of the world.

And then there are the mornings when she has an audience.

She catches sight of him out of the corner of one eye, a shock of red leaning against the fence. She leaves him to his spectatorship; she is only halfway through the form, moving molasses-in-winter slow, each step and stretch blow as precise as she can manage it. The burn is familiar, and comfortable, working through new aches and old stiffness, and by the time she finishes her heartbeat thrums under her skin and she feel awake and electric for it.

She settles the butt of her staff in the dirt of the training yard and looks at her audience.

“Good morning, Commander.”

“Good morning.” He as yet to shrug on his armor; this early, he wears only a simple leather jerkin over his shirt, and leans forward against the fence, arms braced against the crossbar, one boot settled comfortably on the lowest rung. “I didn’t know you had returned.”

“Late last night.” Midnight, nearly. They all agreed to push through; a late arrival had been deemed preferable to another night in their damp bedrolls caked in the mud of the mire. She’d seen the horses stabled and rubbed down, then soaked in her bath until her fingers and toes wrinkled and the muck of the road and the Fallow Mire had turned the water grey, and only then had she collapsed in bed. “Leliana will have the reports by lunch.”

“And they will be on my desk to deal with by dinner.”

Vesper smiles, delicate. “Varric’s is particularly illuminating. There are phrases in there I had never even heard of before.”

“Then I look forward to the education in dwarven cursing.”

He smiles, the slightest crinkling around his eyes, and she returns it before hefting her stave again, breathing slowly and sinking into a ready position.

“It was successful, then?”

“Barring the walking corpses, yes.” Her staff snaps up and out, cutting through the air as she begins the next exercise. “Truly the first trip was more than enough and I think Varric will mutiny if we have to make a third. But the rifts are closed.”

“I am sure the walking corpses appreciate it.”

“They had better.” Step, pivot, swing; left hand forward and release–– She moves fluid, eyes fixed ahead. “Any word from the Dales?”

“Nothing new. Josephine insists they are close to a resolution now that Halamshiral has stabilized, but the fighting still crops up. We intercede as best we can.”

“Perhaps we ought to draft the corpses,” she considers dryly, already halfway to planning a trip west to put out the fires that insist on sparking when she leaves for too long. Step, step, turn, left right left, back, twist––

“I hardly think they could make things any worse.”

She finishes out the form with lunge and holds it as she breathes. When finally she releases, it is with a sigh, eyes closed.

No, she doesn’t think adding more bodies to the pyres would change much either.  The world is unravelling at the seams and they have nothing but a bit of fishing wire and hope to put it to rights.

She opens her eyes and looks to him over her shoulder, head hung low. He rubs a hand over his face, a telltale sign of one of his impending headaches. She can no more solve the problems that plague him than he can fix the troubles laid at her feet.

But damn if she doesn’t hope to try.

“Would you care to spar?”

He blinks a moment, thrown by the shift in the conversation. “I don’t wish to interrupt you.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if you were.”

“I––” He looks as though he has a mind to argue, and then something changes it. He shrugs. “Yes, alright. Staves?”

“Whatever you’d prefer.”

“I am afraid I may be out of practice,” he says ruefully, shrugging out from under his jacket and hoisting himself over the fence. He lands with a cloud of dust.

“It will be good for you, then,” she tells him, watching as he hefts one of the simple wooden poles from where they rest at one side of the training yard and swings it experimentally. It whistles through the air with a low, satisfying hum.

“Or embarrassing,” he returns as Vesper spins her staff in her hands a few times and rolls out her shoulders.

“No magic,” she promises him as she takes her position. It is a useful tool and weapon, of course, but she is not working to hone that. These early morning workouts serve to hone the rest, to prepare her for those situations when she has nothing left to pull on, no spells left to cast, and must yet defend herself. It is a lesson they drilled into her early and often when she first stumbled upon Haven and the budding Inquisition, and it is one that has served her well these many months.

He settles himself. “To the yield?”

“To yield. On your call.”

He meets her eyes, and the corner of his mouth twists up, pulling the scar with it. The smile looks good on him. “Go.”

She shifts her grip on the stave in her hands, eyes fixed on him. They circle a wide counterclockwise circle, boots scuffing in the dust, mirrored in their tension, their waiting. She breathes in and out through her nose and watches for the strike.

He tenses before he moves, quick and sure, testing the waters. She parries the obvious blow, brisk clack of wood against wood echoing through the yard as his stave slides off hers. They move another lazy half circle, almost leisurely, except that he is watching her as hawkishly as she him.

She waits until the light of the still-rising sun catches him full in the face to strike, darting forward with a quick, precise series of blows intended to probe his defense more than cause any harm. Even half blinded he catches them all, and the sound of the fight rises around them.

She steps away but he follows, brings his height and reach to bear as he presses forward to drive her back. Her feet kick up dust as she gives ground faster than she would care to, stave dancing out in front of her until she manages to duck left, spinning out of reach.

“Is this out of practice?”

“I’m very ashamed,” he says, and he says it with a smirk of all things. She ducks in low feinting right and then left before driving the butt of her staff into his ribs, and he coughs as he stumbles back. “I deserved that.”

“You did,” she agrees, rolling out of the way of his countering downswing and popping up in a crouch. She straightens carefully, eyes on him the entire time.

“Hit ‘im already,” someone says nearby, and the surprise of it has her snapping forward, the same blow she was practicing before. He can’t get his guard up fast enough; she catches him across the shoulder with a dull thud and a ragged cheer goes up.

They have, it seems, acquired a gathering.

“C’mon, Ser,” shouts one particularly brazen recruit on the far side of the ring. “You gonna take that lying down?”

“I seem to be standing up,” he calls out in response, but he surges forwards nonetheless, all brute strength and statue, and she weaves a deft but delicate defense, refusing to give more ground than she must. Locked together in their dance, they make a broad circle of the yard. She lets the soldiers fall away, her focus fully on following the commander’s blows, on finding the pinhole openings and striking quickly before ducking further out of reach.

Out of practice. Yeah, sure.

The dance continues until she deflects his blow onto a fence post a little too close to their impromptu audience, and a yelp breaks them apart and out of the fight. A recruit with peach fuzz still on his cheeks holds his smarting hand.

“Sorry,” Vesper says to him, but he only waves her off. She shifts towards the center again, returning to a ready position as Cullen does the same.

“Call it,” she tells him, settling into a crouch and the fight. His eyes are clear amber across from her.

“Go.”

She has fought with many, many people over the past few years, more than she ever did before the world caught fire. Fought with fellow mages and with templars. Fought with bandits and politicians and all sorts inbetween. Fought with the Iron Bull as he coached her through the proper steps of a blow, something stronger and surer than the simple strikes she learned after fleeing the Circle. Fought with Cassandra, with training dummies, with friends and more foes than she cares to count.

A fight is a dance, Bull had said once in a fit of poeticism, or perhaps pique. A dance where you didn’t always know your partner, and often when you wanted your partner to walk away without their head or some other vital organ, but a dance nonetheless. Twin motion, he had meant; a take-and-take where a pair moves in perfect synchronization towards their either/or ending. He’d laughed at it, but he hadn’t been wrong.

The commander makes a good dance partner.

She cannot muster surprise at the discovery; he moves with all the grace and awareness of a soldier, wholly in control of himself. That control shines through clear as anything now as they move in patterns across the training yard with dust in the air around them and the rhythm of their blows like a song and his men, her men, _their_ men, cheering them on in the early morning light.

She might be tangled in the afterthoughts of newfound understanding were she not so busy trying to win.

She gets the upper hand in the end. It is a perfect trip, her foot hooked just behind his ankle and sweeping around, and his feet pull forward as his momentum carries him in the other direction, and when he lands it is flat on his back in a cloud of dust, her stave hovering just above his throat. He blinks up at her a moment, amber eyes almost surprised, almost pleased.

He says, “I yield.”

Vesper pants above him. Despite her heaving chest, the weapon in her hand is unerringly steady. Below her on the ground, Cullen smiles.

She holds there a moment while the training yard whoops and hollers for her victory, then takes half a step back before offering him a hand to help drag him upright. He dusts himself off as she leans heavily on the staff, pushing the sweat-slicked wisps of hair that have come loose from her braid out of her face. She still cannot quite catch her breath.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, standing ever so slightly too close so that she can hear him over the crowd they have drawn. Her heart thrums, and it has nothing to do with the fight. The memory of their dance at the palace rushes back to her, careful steps and the feeling of his fingers warm even through his gloves and the way he had looked at her, so open and unguarded it had been nearly unbearable, only she had born it, had wanted to bear it.

“Of course,” she manages, voice distant to her own ears, almost lost behind the noise of the soldiers. There is such softness to him, beneath the armor, hidden away where it will not be seen. It catches on something swelling in her chest. “Perhaps we might try again sometime.”

“I am certain they would enjoy that,” he says, tilting his head towards their noisy spectators, and with the acknowledgement of the crowd the noise filters back in, and she takes a step back out of his space.

His expression drops for the span of a breath, and her heart burns hot and hopeful in her chest.

She thinks, _Ah._

“Thank you for the practice, Commander,” she says, shaking away the wisps of thoughts-to-be tugging at the edge of her mind. She has no time for them now.

He inclines his head, every inch the commander of the Inquisition, man beneath it all disappearing behind the mask of the office. “Of course, Inquisitor.”

She bows slightly, more incline of her head than anything else, and returns the practice stave to the bin amidst the chattering and glee of a group of soldiers who have just seen their commanding officer loose a spar. They drape their congratulations over her shoulders, and she accepts it all with a quiet smile and the charcoal suggestion of a laugh. She does not turn to look back at the commander standing in the training yard in his sweat-soaked shirtsleeves, staring after her with a warm and steady gaze.

The day has begun, and she has work to do. Thoughts of dancing, and the heart, may wait.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [@cityandking](http://cityandking.tumblr.com)


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